Education in America and Britain

Learning lessons from private schools

The right and wrong ways to get more poor youngsters into the world’s great universities

LOTS of rich people and crummy state schools, especially in the big cities where well-off folk tend to live: these common features of America and Britain help explain the prominence in both countries of an elite tier of private schools. Mostly old, some with fat endowments, places like Eton, Harrow and Phillips Exeter have done extraordinarily well. Fees at independent schools have doubled in real terms over the past 25 years and waiting lists have lengthened. Even in the recession, they are proving surprisingly resilient (see article). A few parents are pulling out, but most are soldiering on and plenty more are clamouring to get their children in.

Row, row together

All sorts of class-based conspiracy theories exist to explain the success of such institutions, but the main reason why they thrive in a more meritocratic world is something much more pragmatic: their ability to get people into elite universities. For Britain and America also have the world's best universities. Look at any of the global rankings and not only do the Ivy League and Oxbridge monopolise the top of the tree, British and (especially) American colleges dominate most of the leading 100 places. This summer graduates will struggle to find jobs, so a degree from a world-famous name like Berkeley or the London School of Economics will be even more valuable than usual. The main asset of the private schools is their reputation for getting children into those good universities.

Only 7% of British children go to private schools, but they account for more than 40% of the intake at Oxford and Cambridge. That statistic is a little unfair: private schools account for a fifth of the people taking A-levels (pretty much essential for getting in). All the same it is notable that Britain's two best-known universities educate more Etonians than boys who were poor enough to get free meals at their schools. In America figures are harder to come by, but the independent sector again does disproportionately well. The universities on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to balance things up (indeed, some rich British children are whisked out of private schools in their final years so they appear to have been state-educated). But in general the elite schools deserve their reputation for getting children onto the next rung up, if only because their pupils do so much better at the exams you need to pass to get in.

A system of elite schools and universities to which the rich have privileged access is neither fair nor efficient. Yet there are worse ways of organising education. At least Britain and America have top-class universities: European and Asian countries, which don't, are scrambling to create some of their own. And attempts to increase equality by getting rid of elitism sometimes achieve the opposite: when British governments in the 1960s and 1970s abolished elite state grammar schools, it became harder still for poor, clever children to get into elite universities.

Nowadays few reformers talk about banning independent schools. Instead they look at fiddling with university admissions. Sadly the methods of most left-leaning educators say much more about their own outdated preoccupations than about the problem. In America tragically the focus has been on race and affirmative-action programmes—a system the private schools have duly exploited by giving scholarships to poor black and Hispanic pupils. In Britain the obsession has been class, with Labour ministers telling the dons of Oxford to find more working-class talent, and setting up a government “Office for Fair Access” (widely known as OffToff) to set targets, albeit non-binding ones, for the proportion of state-school applicants at each university.

There are some areas where universities could be reined in—notably America's system of favouring the children of alumni. But admissions are a symptom, not a cause. Black Americans and working-class Britons struggle because they are overwhelmingly educated in poor government-run schools. Change them and you change the system. And here the private elite schools are useful exemplars. Their success is not based on money, but on organisation. Make head teachers at state schools as accountable to parents as their peers at private schools are and give them the same freedoms, notably to sack poor teachers and pay more to good ones. Then people will not need to go to Winchester or Amherst any more.